Kodiaks volleyball wrap up regular season on the road, playoff picture becoming clearer

By Lethbridge Herald on February 9, 2023.

Herald photo by RY CLARKE Jamie Brown, of the Kodiaks women’s volleyball team, hits the return on the ball agains The King’s University on Friday at the Val Matteotti gym in this November 2022 file photo. The Kodiaks women's team hope for a win at Augusta to give them a comfortable placing in in the standings.

By Justin Seward

Lethbridge Herald

The Lethbridge College Kodiaks volleyball teams wrap up their regular seasons tonight at University of Alberta-Augustana  with different playoff pictures.

The women’s team (10-8) are playing with hopes of a win, which would leave them in a comfortable position and hosting a championship play-in game next week.

“Honestly, we’re looking for the win,” said women’s head coach Anna Schwark.

“I think we’re pretty evenly matched with Augustana. I kind of put them in the mix around like us and Ambrose — (they are) super competitive (and) like don’t make a lot of errors. But I think that we’re right there with them in the skill level and athleticism. So I’m actually pretty excited to kind of see how we can fair up against them. We haven’t seen them at all, even in preseason or exhibition. So I’m looking forward to it.”

Schwark thinks the biggest thing is to have fun for this last league game.

“And not having too high of expectations, but also not ruling ourselves out and going in seeing ourselves as the underdogs,” she said.

“I think that we just need to take every ounce of confidence that we have and just ride with it.”

The biggest factors for the Kodiaks will be aggressive serving and battling through serves on the receiving end.

“We’ve just got to make the most of all the serves that we get and make sure our first contacts just stay really in system as much as we possibly can,” said Schwark.

“Once we’re in system, we’re pretty good offensively. So I think that will be the biggest battle.”

The Kodiaks are third in the division with 20 points and tied with Briercrest, while SAIT is right behind with 16 points.

Both teams have two games to go this weekend as opposed to the Kodiaks one.

“And even with that, I think it’s kind of cool to know that even if the teams that we’re tied with right now win all their matches, that we’re still going to end in a pretty decent spot,” she said.

“Some of the ties we lose, you know like with SAIT, they beat us already. If we’re in a tie with Briercrest, we’ll take that one.”

As for the men’s team, they’ll play for pride in this game as they locked up second place in the south  and a berth in the ACAC championships in a couple of weeks.

“The boys are hungry to keep improving,” said coach Greg Gibos.

“We don’t feel as though we’ve quite peaked at this time, so we are going to treat this like another important league game. This weekend is the final dress rehearsal for championships so we are excited to show the growth we’ve had again since Saturday. So this week is all about sharpening the final tools that we will need for championships.”

Gibos is hopeful to play most of his bench tonight.

“We are hopeful to get a large portion of our roster on the floor this weekend as we’ve had 17 athletes all pouring themselves in to this season. We want to reward everyone for all their efforts this season.”